Carney shoots for most laughs

It’s been a lighthearted hobby for this POLITICO reporter over the years to cover the White House press briefing room with one specific criteria in mind: laughter.

How so? When there’s laughter during briefings — from the press secretary or the reporters or both — the official stenographer indicates as much by inserting “(Laughter)” into the transcript.

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It’s hardly as weighty as a Congressional Budget Office analysis, but the tension — and the break in tension — between presidential spokespersons and the White House press corps is a shifting gauge that continues to intrigue Washington media watchers.

The current spokesman, Jay Carney, just passed his one-year anniversary behind the podium last month and the results are in: Carney’s briefings are pretty funny, but he can’t claim the title.

Over the past year, White House transcripts indicate 723 instances of “(Laughter)” during Carney’s briefings. That’s more than Ari Fleischer during his first year (410), Scott McClellan (261) and Dana Perino (219). And Carney even bested Tony Snow (513), whose briefings, at the time, were billed as must-see TV. When Snow stepped down in 2007, McClatchy Newspapers’s William Douglas wrote, “It wasn’t the longest-running performance — just 16 months and 136 appearances — but the Tony Snow show will probably go down as the most entertaining and effective in recent White House history.”

Carney fell short, however, of besting the reigning champion, his immediate predecessor, Robert Gibbs, whose 1,927 instances of laughter could become the Joe DiMaggio hitting streak of Washington records. At the time, CBS’s Mark Knoller told POLITICO that Gibbs is “more inclined to make a wisecrack than any press secretary” he’s covered. (Knoller’s been at the White House since the Ford administration.)

That Carney scored so high on the Merriment Meter might come as surprise to some. When he took the podium a year ago, Carney was described by The New York Times as “so soft-spoken that sound technicians in the White House briefing room sometimes have to crank up the volume when he speaks.” About his first briefing, the paper wrote: “Mr. Carney was businesslike; Mr. Gibbs typically punctuated his briefings with jokes and sports talk, his banter belying the generally strained relations with the White House press.”

ABC’s Ann Compton told POLITICO: “I do not think Jay is a funny press secretary, although he has a fine sense of humor.” She also thinks an administration’s first press secretary (Fleischer for George W. Bush and Gibbs for Barack Obama) tend to have things a little easier than those who follow.

“For brand-new press secretaries, the president isn’t really on the defensive much,” Compton said. “When you get into the first gear of a press secretary’s tenure, the president is absolutely on the defensive and absolutely underwater in terms of his job approval rating; laughs are a little tougher to come by.”

Carney’s comedic high point may have been last summer, when he briefed reporters on dry budget talks.

“And the President is interested in strengthening Social Security for the long term in ways that preserve the promise of the program and don’t slash benefits,” Carney said during that briefing.